In typical photofinishing operations a user (sometimes referenced as a customer), delivers one or more film rolls carrying corresponding exposed films, to a processing laboratory to have them chemically developed and hardcopies of the images (such as paper prints or slides) prepared. The user can include an individual or a retail store. Individual films are often spliced together end to end to form a larger roll which is easily handled by automated equipment. Following chemical processing of the roll to yield permanent images from the latent images on the films, each image is scanned at high speed to obtain image characteristics, such as color and density. These characteristics are passed to an optical printer which uses the characteristic data to adjust exposure conditions (such as exposure time, color balance, and the like) of an image frame on the developed film which is optically projected onto a photosensitive paper. The exposed photosensitive paper is then chemically developed to yield the final hardcopy prints. In modern photofinishing operations, images may optionally also be scanned to provide an image signal corresponding to each image on the film. These image signals are usually stored on a medium such as a magnetic or optical disk and provided to the customer, or made available to the customer over the Internet, and may be used then or at a later time to provide a hardcopy output. Recently it has been described that the optical printer can be replaced with a digital printer which will print the images directly from the scanned data, following enhancements or other manipulations to the scanned images. When the customer order is completed, each film is cut into strips (for 35 mm film) or reattached to a film cassette (for Advanced Photo System films), the exposed paper (when prints are made) is cut into individual prints, and the film, completed prints and any other media (such as a disk bearing scanned images, or mounted slides) are packaged at a finishing station and the order is then complete.
It is known to provide a service whereby a photographer can provide a particular image to a service operator, who will scan the image and print it on T-shirts, cups, calendars, or similar items. Such products can also be ordered remotely from a personal computer using digitized images and a service such as Eastman Kodak's KODAK IMAGE MAGIC PRINT SERVICE. It has been known that when a single product is ordered from a printer of a photofinishing system, a separate sheet can be printed at the printer which sheet has a thumbnail of a print to follow, an indication of the number of copies of the print, and a customer address. However, there is a high degree of interest among photographers, in obtaining multiple image products from a photofinisher, which incorporate their images. Various customer image products are, for example, described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,459,819. Digital photofinishing operations in particular, lend themselves to readily providing a multitude of image incorporating products in accordance with customer instructions. However, different image products desired by customers may require different image printers. For example, a customer request for a poster or a T-shirt incorporating an image may require the use of different special large format printers, in addition to the use of a printer to provide the typical smaller sized prints desired by customers. This means that to complete such a customer's order will require assembly of prints from a number of different physically separated printers. Furthermore, each printer will not likely print every image, and different printers may operate at different speeds, and the product composition of each order will likely be different (some requiring the use of only one printer, while others require the use of one or more other printers). Thus, it is very likely that a customer's image products will be printed on different printers at different times, and will be intermingled with products intended for other consumers. This requires a photofinishing operator to visually monitor the status of printers to determine when a printer has finished producing image prints which may belong to a given order.
The foregoing situation leads to the problem of assembling all image prints requested in a given customer order at a single location so that the completed customer order can be packaged, ready for delivery to the customer. One existing approach is the use of a single printing device for serial outputs of general content, where each page in a print request is different, is demonstrated by the common office laser printer. Such printers are under computer control and can be configured to print a "banner" page between each print request. The print "files" may have any number of pages. The banner print serves to identify the printout. A very similar approach is taken in the use of a conventional facsimile machine. The user typically fills out a form identifying the recipient and number of pages in the fax and places the form at the beginning of the pages to be transmitted. At the receiving end, the fax machine may print several transmissions in a row before the output is picked up by the recipient. Each form at the beginning of each transmission serves to identify the pages of that transmission. In neither case, however, is it necessary to collate multiple different outputs from multiple devices.
In conventional photofinishing operations, an identification of an image order may be placed on each output of a given order. For example, the different prints, computer or computer disks may carry a common identifier for each order. Those products may then be collated for delivery to the customer by combining all of the products with a common identifier. However, such a method requires marking the image products themselves with the identification, which some customers find undesirable. In addition, typical commercial photofinishing operations may process images at the rate of 200 per minute or much higher. Matching prints from multiple printers using such a technique can be demanding, since each product must be identified.
It would be desirable then, to have some method to facilitate collating image prints from different printers, which prints are of images from the same customer order, and which method does not require matching printed identifications on all image prints from all sub-orders. It would also be desirable if a photofinishing operator knew when to look at a given printer to locate an image print of a given customer order, so that maintaining a visual watch on multiple printers would be unnecessary.